REU/LTER: Insect Fossils and Late Quaternary Environments of Western Texas

对沙漠晚第四纪环境的认识 在过去的二十年里，西南航空公司的规模大大扩大， 主要介绍了对食草鼠的古植物学研究 贝登斯 吉娃娃的古生态重建 德克萨斯州西部的沙漠地区已经被货车 Devender（1985）在过去的40，000年中，记录了一系列 植被对环境变化的反应， 在威斯康星州冰河期之后。 货车德文德制作了一系列 的110个昆虫化石组合可供详细 调查 在本研究中，这些组合将用于测试 关于过去昆虫区系的现代类似物的假说 组合，昆虫响应的相对速率 与植被相比，环境变化，以及 现代奇瓦瓦沙漠昆虫群的起源 在 此外，在褐家鼠贝冢中昆虫化石的埋藏， 现代昆虫栖息地和分布数据将被检查， 被收集。 对活捕的驮鼠进行的实验将测试它们的 对各种大型甲虫的接受和/或偏好 物种 这些昆虫化石样本所覆盖的时间跨度 古植物学的记录，并来自同一个垃圾堆， 样品 这提供了逐个站点和逐个样本的 古植物学数据和放射性碳年代学 昆虫化石数据。

Knowledge of Late Quaternary environments of the desert southwest has expanded greatly in the past twenty years, due mostly to the introduction of paleobotanical studies of packrat middens. Paleoecological reconstructions of the Chihuahuan Desert regions of western Texas have been developed by Van Devender (1985) for the past 40,000 years, documenting a series of vegetational responses to environmental changes during and after the Wisconsin Glaciation. Van Devender has made a series of 110 insect fossil assemblages available for detailed investigation. In this research, these assemblages will be used to test hypotheses concerning modern analogs for past insect faunal assemblages, the relative rate of insect response to environmental change in comparison to that of the vegetation, and the origins of the modern Chihuahuan Desert insect fauna. In addition, the taphonomy of insect fossils in packrat middens will be examined and modern insect habitat and distribution data will be collected. Experiments on live-trapped packrats will test their acceptance and/or preference for various large-sized beetle species. The insect fossil samples cover the same time span as the paleobotanical record, and derive from the same midden samples. This provides site-by-site and sample-by-sample paleobotanical data and radiocarbon chronologies for correlation with insect fossil data.